I recently moved one of my blog’s to it’s own IP address, but strangely Google’s feed readers are still picking up that site on the original IP Address. It has been several days now, and Google is still requesting the site at the old IP Address. I did some digging and found that even though I changed the IP Address, the SOA Serial didn’t get incremented. As a result, Google’s DNS servers are using cached records and not requesting new ones because the serial hasn’t changed.
This seems like a pretty serious problem for GoDaddy. I double checked everything again tonight by creating some new records. The new records resolve to the IP’s that I specified, but the serial remains unchanged.
I tried various things that definitely should have caused the serial number to be incremented:
– Adding a new A record,
– Modifying an A record
– Deleting an A record
None of which updated the serial as it should have.
Finally, I noticed on the main page for my domain (the one that lists the name servers, registrant info, etc) that next to Name Servers: it said Last Update: 11/23/2007, which coincided with the date of the serial. I was finally able to update the Serial by acting like I was changing my name servers, then just submitting the page without making any changes.
It seems this is a fundamentally broken DNS system though. Frankly, I’m pretty surprised to have something like that from GoDaddy, where I’m sure you do DNS for hundreds of thousands of domains. While troubleshooting, I emailed GoDaddy’s support a couple times and were less than helpful. Their basic response was:
We are unable to update the SOA serial on demand. This information is updated periodically, and is the way our systems currently process. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.
Godaddy seriously sucks. I’ve had issue with them changing host IPs for our name servers (we run a hosting company). Whenever I make the IP changes to one domain, the host doesn’t update and I don’t receive an email confirming or denying its success. It used to work and it still works for a second domain, but for whatever reason the one domain won’t update. I contacted support and they were like “sorry we don’t help you with custom DNS, contact your hosting provider.” WHAT? It’s not custom DNS morons and I am the hosting provider.
My experience with their support was about the same: ‘If you don’t like it, too bad. Go somewhere else’. Most people who use their DNS are not technical at all, and I guess it suffices for them. I’ve been using it out of convenience, and so I don’t have yet *another* login to keep track of. But I might have to consider moving at least one or two of my main domains to somewhere that actually works correctly.